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Weekend Hide-In - House Westmore
Rosendal, Free State
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Click to view map Coordinates: | Award of Merit citation This is the proverbial small building with big ideas. The brief from the client was simple and direct - minimal accommodation was to be added to a small building on a site on the edge of the town of Rosendal in the eastern Free State. This part of the country is well known and enjoyed for its scenic beauty. The area marks the beginning of the topographical build-up to the Maluti Mountains in Lesotho. The horizon line of the undulating landscape is punctuated with flat-topped mountains. Usually, these mountains are crowned with a layer of sandstone that is still resisting the slow forces of erosion - the continual shaper of this landscape. In summer, the huge floating clouds become the visual counterpoint to these mountains; in winter, the landscape turns brown, it is bare and usually bitterly cold. Man and man-made objects, like architecture, are relatively small in scale in relation to this natural backdrop. The older part of Rosendal, where this building is located, has the usual grid layout, vaguely orientated to the cardinal points. The grid of Rosendal is generally so sparsely built up that it is of no real spatial consequence. Most buildings read, thus, as objects in space. With the design of this small weekend abode, Dickens realised intuitively that this large, natural landscape was the real context and not necessarily the rest of the built fabric of Rosendal. If the plan of the building is analysed, it is as if she arranged the accommodation in discrete spatial units in a 'street and square' configuration. In reality, it acts as an urban counterpoint to Rosendal - the town that does not exist as an urban space, but only as a loose collection of largely unrelated buildings. In turn, these 'streets', corridors, movement routes and visual axes, and the 'square' - the main social space - are the real elements that relate back to the vastness of the landscape. The new elements of accommodation are brought in relation to the original structure in an additive/cumulative process, much like cities change and morph over time. All the new elements have been wrapped in layers of black metal cladding - as if they are not really there. This action also places them in a position of contrast to the original white-painted building. The cladding and the way that the openings have been articulated in it creates an illusion of thick walls that are, again, not there in reality but instead act as an emotional layer of protection against the vastness of the landscape. The central 'square', or outside deck where most outside social activities would occur against the background of the landscape, has been framed with a metal frame that creates a cube-like space. Without this cube, the space would not have existed - it frames and defines the urban square, while it waits for the city to arrive. Like all good (urban) architecture, Dickens created thresholds of privacy and security to be negotiated, while moving between, and before entering, the different elements of the accommodation. The cladding, the moving screens (that are actually security devices) and the framed views into and out of the building, add to its sense of surprise and mystery. It has often been said that a house is like a city and a city is like a house - in this instance, this phrase is also applicable to the building at hand. Fortunately, Dickens did not fall into the trap of using sandstone and corrugated iron as materials - for so many, the symbols of the romantic domesticity of dwelling in this landscape. She used forms and materiality that are relevant to the time, while making contemporary references to longer-term traditions. The most poetic of all the gestures might be the small floor-level window inserted into the original building. This window simply frames a view onto the Free State veld. This is a small-scale but profound celebration of place. Like all good poetry, this building alludes to the acute powers of observation and interpretation of the architect, Carmen Dickens. Like all good poetry, each stroke of the pen makes reference to powerful associations that cannot always be described or built. (Paul Kotze - 2014) All truncated references not fully cited below are those of Joanna Walker's original text and cited in full in the 'Bibliography' entry of the Lexicon. Books that reference Weekend Hide-In - House Westmore
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